The blonde’s bombshell

Lucy Walker's terrifying new documentary warns that Nuclear Armageddon is closer than we think. She is a British director making a big bang at Cannes

Lucy Walker taken during the making of her documentary, Countdown To Zero (Jim Denault)
Lucy Walker learnt a lot of incredibly scary things while she was making
Countdown to Zero, her harrowing but enthralling documentary about the
dangers of nuclear weapons. “A nonfiction horror movie,” she calls the film,
which promises to do for nuclear danger what An Inconvenient Truth did for
global warming (her film shares producers with Al Gore’s). Hillary Clinton
recently saw it and recommended it to her team at the State Department; Ban
Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the UN, has seen it. It will make
international headlines tomorrow, when it has a special gala screening at
the Cannes film festival.

However, nothing Walker heard when she interviewed an extensive range of
nuclear experts and ­powerful politicians — including Mikhail Gorbachev,
Jimmy Carter, Pervez Musharraf and Tony Blair, all of whom have actually had
their fingers on a nuclear trigger — terrified her more than a short
sentence in Russian from a forgotten